A Book That Inspired Me To Play Chess Again

Since my second IM norm in 2014 I have hardly played chess tournaments. I did play a number of league games each year in the Netherlands before the pandemic hit, but over the last four years, I participated in just one (weekend) tournament. My work at Chess.com means that I am deeply involved in chess on a daily basis and I just couldn't get myself to spend even more time on the game. There's more in life!

However, recently I came across a book that changed things. It was different from almost any other book I had ever seen on chess, and that already means something. I once read that there is no sport in the world about which more books are written than chess, and that's easy to believe. In that context, to do something that hasn't really been done before in a proper way is an achievement in itself.

I am talking about How To Study Chess On Your Own by Davorin Kuljasevic (New in Chess, 2021). For me, after being involved in chess for 32 years—I started playing a lot in 1989 and joined a club in 1990—without working with a trainer and without ever really seriously studying it, this was the very first time that someone explained what serious study involves. It is the first book since Jonathan Rowson's fantastic Chess for Zebras was published about two decades ago, that truly inspired me to pick up chess studying again.

I came across the book shortly after I had moved to my new house, where I have my home office on the top floor. With the extra space available, I bought myself a nice chess table and a new set of pieces.

Behind it, I set up an extra bookcase for all the books that I still intended to study, at some point in my life, wherever, whenever. This included all of Kasparov's books, so you can imagine I still have plenty to do if I want to. I was kind of hoping that this new environment could inspire me to get enthusiastic about chess again (in the sense of playing myself and trying to get back to my old level to some extent). And then Kuljasevic came along, and everything clicked.

I should add immediately one important detail: I am a chaotic person. I am not good at planning ahead, doing things in a structured way, remembering stuff to do, creating new habits, you name it. If you're like me and you struggle working on your chess, this book is for you too.

Because that's what Kuljasevic is focusing on: how to study chess in a structured way. We all have our books/apps/videos, with tactics, game collections, strategy, some biographies perhaps, and endgames, for the real die-hards, but how many of us actually study those in a good way? 'Good', here, means e.g. in the right order, in the right depth, and taking the right amount of time to do so.

"From my experience, many chess players would like to approach their studies in a structured way, but they lack either the tools or the discipline to do so," is how Kuljasevic puts it, and it's spot on.

In his book, the 34-year-old Croatian grandmaster provides a structured study methodology and philosophy to improve your chess on your own. To explain this further, it's probably best to just quote from the Preface:

For this purpose, I did two things. Firstly, I categorized and classified the key concepts, such as typical study methods, areas, and resources, in the individual chapters. Secondly, I have structured the chapters in such a way that they can help you systematically build your own study plan. The overview of the key issues in their respective chapters below should give you an idea about this process:

• What the right and wrong chess study mindsets are and how to optimize your learning processes (Chapter 1);
• How to develop good study habits and get rid of the useless ones (Chapter 2);
• Which study areas players should focus on in their chess study and how to distribute the time between them (Chapter 3);
• Which kinds of study resources are appropriate for players of different levels and how to make the best use of them (Chapter 4);
• How to study various aspects of openings, middlegames, and endgames effectively on your own (Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8);
• How to design your own study plans and training schedules (Chapter 9).

What I found quite useful is Kuljasevic's tendency to structure lots of his suggestions in bullet-point lists and tables. For example, I found the following table from the second chapter very useful, which lists the 15 most common study methods and what are their practical relevance, study intensity, and long-term learning potential according to the author.

Besides all the very helpful tools and ideas to properly structure your chess studying, the book itself contains lots of chess as well. For starters, the first eight chapters start with a selection of diagram previews of key positions that get discussed later in the chapter. The author recommends solving these as exercises before anything else.

There are also lots of games and game fragments and almost all of them are new in chess literature, with examples from recent GM practice and Kuljasevic's own games or analysis from his students.

Here's a good example.

However, I have to admit that when reading this book in June, I did exactly the thing that's not recommended: reading all the text but skipping all the chess. I just skimmed through it. I can hear you think: how are you supposed to get any better that way?

Well, the reasoning was as follows: at this point, I was mainly interested in the author's remarks on how to study and how to do it in a structured way. I wanted to make a study plan for my own as quickly as possible and start doing things by July 1, using all those great books I've had for years but never used.

I read the whole book except for the actual chess parts, even met with Kuljasevic for an hour on Zoom to discuss a study plan briefly (and he kindly send me a file of exercises free of charge!), and then formulated a study plan for myself, which I turned into an actual schedule for studying chess for the first week.

What happened next was far from ideal: I kind of managed to follow that first week of studying, but I completely failed to come up with new schedules for the coming weeks. I basically lack the structure to create a structure!

However—and this makes me quite happy anyway—I actually managed to spend some time on chess every single day. Structured or not, I did something, at least something, each day for at least six weeks in a row. I might never have done that ever before in my life! Talk about inspiration.

What I did was tactics on my phone, a bit of reasonably serious online blitz, I worked a bit on my black openings and most importantly, I did Simulation (as noted in the table above) on a topic that is a clear weakness for me: defense. The way I did it, adviced by Kuljasevic in the book, is getting a book with properly annotated games (in my case an old one: Colin Crouch's How to Defend in Chess), then find each game in an online source without annotations, put the opening moves on the board and then actually spend time calculating, guess each move (in this case, Lasker's) before turning to the annotations. I did that a few times and was quite proud of myself for doing that. In fitness, the only way to get stronger muscles is to train out of your comfort zone, and in chess, it's no different.

I also had a clear point to work towards, as I had signed up for the Spilimbergo Open, which I played in between August 9-15. (The tournament is well organized by the way; I can recommend it.)

Let's cut to the chase: the result was terrible. I lost 34 Elo points. I used to be a 2250 player for about a decade and scored two IM norms but now my new FIDE rating will be 2116. Quite painful!

However, I am taking away lots of positives from this tournament. The most important thing is that I played almost exclusively very interesting games. Seven of them were great adventures where I had my chances but also missed easy tactics. (As a chess writer, it's generally good to play tournaments sometimes to remind yourself how an "easy" tactic is often not so easy while sitting at the board!)

An example is the first round, where I was doing well out of the opening against a 2500-player. I looked at exchange sacrifices all the time, but couldn't get them to work in my head. As so often in such positions, you don't need to see concrete effects; the force of the bishop on g7 is often long-term!

I could easily live with this loss. It helps if your opponent is much higher rated and also, I blamed one moment: I spent 40 minutes on 18...Qa5, as I got really confused there and was clearly rusty. With a 90|30 time control, you really cannot afford to spend 40 minutes on one move. I knew that, and still, it's hard to avoid sometimes, especially in a first round...

I am only disappointed about the level I showed in two of my black games, which were really quite dreadful. In the others, I was often quite close to scoring a half or full point more than I did. In other words, with a bit more practice and warming up, I am sure I can do better in future events.

Another positive is that I responded in a much more healthy way to the losses than before. I used to be quite devastated and down after a loss, but in this tournament, I managed to enjoy being part of some very interesting games.

In one crucial game in round eight, which I lost unnecessarily after getting a winning position out of the opening (which kind of determined that it was going to be a bad tournament instead of an OK one), I congratulated my opponent for finding lots of strong moves and we even analyzed for over an hour because it was so interesting. I would never do that! Here it is—I still need to properly analyze:

Part of all that was the realization that, after all the lockdowns, not traveling for over 1.5 years and seeing friends and family much less during the pandemic, it was a gift to be abroad again, play chess, and spend time with friends at the swimming pool during the day and enjoying great Italian food and wine in the evenings. It was a nice feeling to be "back at it" after such a long time.

How To Study Chess On Your Own is only Kuljasevic's second book, after his Beyond Material (2019) from the same publisher, which I haven't read yet. If I manage to keep my renewed enthusiasm for chess, I will surely read that one as well one day. And I might even re-read How to Study Chess On Your Own, this time actually going through the chess fragments. The book deserves it!

See (or rather, hear) also Kuljasevic's appearance in the Perpetual Chess Podcast.